1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a heat dissipater such as a heat dissipation member or the like that radiates heat undesirably generated at an integrated circuit that is mounted on a flexible substrate such as a flexible printed circuit board or the like. The flexible printed circuit board to which the heat dissipater according to an aspect of the invention is applied is used, for example, in a liquid crystal device without any intention of limitation thereto. In addition, the invention relates to an electro-optical device that is provided with such a heat dissipater, and further to an electronic apparatus that is provided with such an electro-optical device. A non-limiting example of the electronic apparatus according to an aspect of the invention is a liquid crystal projector.
2. Related Art
In the technical field to which the electro-optical device according to an aspect of the invention pertains, there is an electro-optical device that is mainly made up of an electro-optical panel such as a liquid crystal panel and a flexible printed circuit board on which a driving integrated circuit is mounted. In the typical configuration of the electro-optical device of the related art, the electro-optical panel performs electro-optical operations such as the displaying of images in a pixel region (The pixel region may be hereafter referred to as an “image display region” if the context allows). The driving integrated circuit that is mounted on the flexible printed circuit board constitutes at least a part of a control circuit that drives and/or controls the electro-optical panel. Since at least a part of the control circuit is configured as a discrete component that is separated from the electro-optical panel in the above-described typical configuration of the electro-optical device of the related art, it is possible not only to reduce the absolute size of the electro-optical panel but also to increase the size of the pixel region relative to the size of the electro-optical panel. The integrated circuit, which is provided to drive the electro-optical panel as described above, is mounted on the flexible printed circuit board that is electrically connected to the electro-optical panel. A chip-mounting technique such as a chip-on-film (COF) method is used when the driving integrated circuit is mounted onto the flexible printed circuit board. An example of such a configuration is described in JP-A-2004-252331.
These days, as the processing power of the driving integrated circuit increases, so does the power consumption thereof. Due to the increased power consumption, the amount of heat generated during the operation of the driving integrated circuit is also on the rise. For this reason, there is an adverse and increasing possibility that the thermal runaway and/or the thermal destruction of an electro-optical device may occur because of undesirable heat that is produced by the driving integrated circuit.